Abstract Technology Handling for Generator-Based Analog Circuit Design

Designing analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits is still a matter of comprehensive manual tasks. Although a variety of optimization-based and procedural generator-based analog design automation approaches have been presented, they still lack a proper handling of so-called expert knowledge in an abstract way. We present a new method to capture expert knowledge by an abstract, generator-based analog circuit description. This approach moves detailed procedural circuit descriptions further towards a high-level description. Using the presented method, the circuit is defined by generic code which is converted to an abstract graph representation. The graph is subsequently used to apply technology-specific design rules and further constraints to ensure DRC-clean and robust layouts. As a result, a much wider set of advanced technology nodes can be targeted by the same parameterizable, procedural circuit description compared to previous approaches. Therefore, re-use of dedicated circuit blocks is improved which both eases utilization by designers and supports circuit optimization.